When Love Doth Sprout
by Coffin Liqueur
Summary: Woes-of-parenting one-shot. Mama Marguerite fusses whether her kids are growin' up right.


Marguerite loved them very much.

It was why it was with wistfulness that she looked at them, sometimes, the way someone looks out a window at the leaves tinting orange in the cool-breezy liminal space between late summer and early fall. That was silly of her - they were still fresh and green.

And strong, every which way - Zoe having gotten her slight build, or Lucas having gotten her bony figure, or not. At the same time, Zoe had her independence and her Daddy's quiet temper - all the spirit of a much larger human being. Lucas had his unshakable intelligence and pride. And his incorrigible feistiness.

She was a mama. Of course it made her all proud to think that these two, each intelligent and ferocious enough for five people at least, existed through her.

Very, very proud, and very, very vicariously _lonely._

_That _was the sorrow.

She looked at each of them and saw an island - an individual dark shadow moving quiet across a field. Like watching a barn cat go stray as it leaves its post further and further day by day, by day, by day.

They'd barely spoken to each other since Lucas turned sixteen. It was that boy she worried about, in particular - who anchored her thoughts as Zoe talked in a dusty, smoky little lift of casual laughter about schools out of state, or as he emerged from wherever it was in the attics and crawlspaces he holed up in with his bits and bobs and gadgets, ghost-like, and turning around and disappearing again at the sound of Jack coming on upstairs for a word.

_They've grown up strong, _yeah. She could nod to herself over that.

And then in would tremble voice of that very anchored thought.

_But maybe they _had _to. Maybe they _have _to be alone._

A tiny hitch would pick up in her throat sometimes - yank from her chest with a squeak as she wrapped her arms around herself, steadily turned, biting her lip at the beginning turns and cable draws of pain.

_...Maybe they can't_ love.

The hitch would tug again, and she would turn her face down to her hands, palms coming up. Thoughts would build up with heat in her skull - air in a kettle. Of a six-year-old's brain scan and a little boy piecing together a puzzle on the rug - asking what the rancid smell was comin' down from the attic, and giving a just-too-singsonged "IIII dunno".

And of a teen girl, hair ruffled and eyes glittering with overflowed frustration, dead in front of her face. A knife snatched from behind her vanity, stance hunched forward as she backed and brandished, full wounded, wounded animal. "I said get away from me!" she was crying, with a bizarre tight, high waver of fear.

And Marguerite would cry, too, as her head fell down into her hands. Oftentimes, Jack would step on up next to her - unmistakable soft thuds of boots on the wood - and she would slow-turn his way and lean against his chest as he put his arms around her. Softly ask her what's wrong, in that warm-dry and smoked-out tone that Zoe liked for the same question (ha - maybe it was her. It was her old worries. Maybe _she_ was the one who was wrong), before she'd force a laugh with a hiccup, sniff with a brush at her nose, and say, aired-through and bound to a tremble, "You know...

"Worryin' about that young man and lady, again."

Jack would sigh a low-rumbling "aaaaaah..." and scoff a laugh, with a tiny bounce of heart. Pat her on the back, in rhythm, gentle-yet-firm. Say "You know I do, too."

She was definitely wrong.

And she'd put her arms around him, back. Focus on the simple warm of the moment with the slightest tension held behind the mask of her face. Waiting for that kettle to cool and silence. Forgetting that faulty wiring, so she knew, could be hereditary. That Lucas's oddity and lack of compassion, Zoe's lapses of fear and anger, god, either one of them could have come from anywhere. About the time that Lucas stole scraps to "play", as he still called it and confessed to all flatly-sassy like it weren't no odd thing back then, and Jack broke his nose; about all the times that she shouted at Zoe for moments of excessive daring and following her young spirit too fast, and the girl stared at her as she backed up with those big sky-green eyes like her father's, and turned away with her head down to go see Jack, because she knew he would understand.

And she'd let the third worry melt away - diffuse icy into and then silently, bodilessly drain away in a current of tear-warm water.

_What if they don't know how to love... And it's because we couldn't teach them?_

* * *

Written for the r/FanFiction June Daily Prompt challenge. June 25th: "Seed".


End file.
